ABSTRACT
In December 1980 the US Merit Systems Protection Board ruled that Harry Hobgood, a thirty-four year-old career attorney in the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) Bureau of Competition, had been harassed by the agency "because of his conservatism" and that harassment was a violation of federal law. The administration's new head of the FTC's Bureau of Competition was Thomas John Campbell, "a 29-year-old prodigy who had been the youngest student ever to pass the University of Chicago's doctoral exams in economics". In 1980 the FTC pinpointed Bufferin and Excedrin commercials, claiming that Bristol-Myers overstated the benefits of these analgesics. But Purdue University researchers concluded at the end of 1980 that remedial advertisements "may be miscomprehended as much as—or even more than—the advertising they are supposed to remedy". There was frequent misunderstanding of the remedial material by the test group of consumers, opening to question the quality of this particular consumerist invention.
